April 6, 1998

By Isabel Vincent The Globe and Mail

ENFORCERS CHALLENGE CANNABIS LIBERATION MOVEMENT

"I felt I had to make a point," said the soft-spoken woman, who has multiple sclerosis and says she has been smoking marijuana for a year in an effort to relieve her pain. "I can’t live without it [marijuana] and I didn’t want my neighbours to call Crime Stoppers and bother my children, so I went to them. I went to get arrested."

The decriminalization movement is joined by hundreds of recreational smokers who also say that the country’s laws against cannabis are outdated and out of step with the rest of the Western world, where many governments have eased restrictions on possession and use of the drug in the past few years.

The decriminalization proponents have lately found themselves in a pitched battle with Canadian law -enforcement officials, who say cannabis is a dangerous drug, and its possession and consumption should not be tolerated in any circumstances.

"Three million people in Canada use marijuana. Many people grow it in their homes, and the police go after them with automatic weapons and SWAT teams. It’s ludicrous," said Mr. Emery, who has been arrested four times for selling high-grade cannabis seeds to buyers in the United States. Mr. Emery, who is facing 15 counts of trafficking and possession, said he was recently forced to sell his Cannabis Cafe, which had been raided twice by law-enforcement officials. See

Like his counterparts in the decriminalization crusade, Mr. Emery, 40, says the drug is relatively harmless and much safer than alcohol or tobacco. Moreover, he argues, poll after poll has shown that a majority of Canadians support the decriminalization of the drug, or at least a change in policy regulating its use.

But many law-enforcement officials argue that medical research on the effects of the long-term use of marijuana are inconclusive, and that contemporary marijuana, which is produced from the cannabis plant, is much stronger that than it was in the 1960s. They say marijuana’s THC levels are much higher today than they were 20 years ago. THC stands for tetrahydrocannabinol and is the active ingredient in the drug that gives smokers their high.

"Right now, the THC level in marijuana is between 16 and 20 per cent. Twenty years ago it was between 3 and 5 per cent," said RCMP Constable Scott Rintoul, who is part of the force’s drug-enforcement unit in Vancouver. (Ed. note: This man is either a liar or completely incompetent. According to NIDA, average potency in American samples remains around 3%. There is no reason to believe that indoor cannabis is any different in Canada.)

But the higher THC content means people actually need to smoke less of the drug to get high, decriminalization supporters say.

"We’re really concerned," said Constable Rintoul, adding that, according to some of the scientific studies distributed by the RCMP, marijuana’s effects last up to eight times longer than those of alcohol. "Right now, aside from alcohol, marijuana is the No. 1 drugs that we find on impaired drivers. We can’t handle all the problems that we have with alcohol and tobacco right now. Why would we want to decriminalize another menacing drug?"

He said the RCMP is so concerned about marijuana-impaired drivers that the force has recently trained 40 "drug-recognition officers" in British Columbia. These traffic officers now administer a series of drug tests to impaired drivers to determine whether they have been smoking marijuana. British Columbia, where statistics show marijuana consumption is the highest in the country, is the first province to implement this strategy, which the RCMP hope to adopt in other provinces.

"Most of the RCMP claims about the dangers of marijuana are idiotic, unfounded and inaccurate," said Alan Young, a professor of law at Osgoode Hall Law School in Toronto who has been researching cannabis policy for the past 10 years and is lead defense counsel on several cases, including Ms. Harichy’s, that are seeking to force the decriminalization of cannabis. "The only way that the prohibition of this drug is maintained is through the dissemination of propaganda and the use of medical studies that are outdated and discredited by the scientific community," he said.

Indeed, in a recent Ontario case in which Christopher Clay was charged with trafficking in cannabis, the presiding judge said that after, analyzing the scientific evidence on the effects of marijuana presented at the trial, he had concluded that "consumption of marijuana is relatively harmless compared to the so-called hard drugs and including tobacco and alcohol."

Although Mr. Clay was found guilty of trafficking, Mr. Justice J.F. McCart of the Ontario Court’s General Division said that "there exists no hard evidence demonstrating any irreversible organic or mental damage from the consumption of marijuana."

Decriminalization advocates such as Mr. Young, who is appealing the decision in Mr. Clay’s case argue that if the drug were to be legalized regulations could be introduced that would prevent unscrupulous traffickers from selling marijuana mixed with sometimes harmful contaminants.

"It’s the ostrich effect," Mr. Young said. "They just ignore the whole issue in the hope that it will go away." See

Charles Perkins, a member of one of the few Canadian anti-cannabis groups, agrees. "I have been to Ottawa several times to discuss this issue and I’ve been totally ignored," said Mr. Perkins, spokesman for the Sarnia-based Lambton Families in Action for Drug Education, Inc. which promotes drug awareness in local schools.

According to a 1995 study by Health and Welfare Canada, 70 per cent of Canadians want a change in the law in drug policy related to cannabis and said they were opposed to the use of jail sentences to combat marijuana use. For different reasons, many activists on both sides of the decriminalization struggle say that the Canadian legislation on cannabis is rather outdated and vague.

In this country, the history of drug prohibition legislation goes back to the 1911 Opium and Drug Act, which contained no reference to marijuana. In 1923, cannabis was added to the list of prohibited drugs, without any discussion or debate in the House of Commons about its inclusion.

Why, critics ask, was the drug included, especially given that until 1937 there were no convictions for possession of marijuana, and for the next 20 years the conviction rate hovered between zero and 12 per cent? In fact, there were no significant numbers of recorded offences until the late 1960s, when marijuana increased in popularity among young, upper-middle-class adults.

Many critics say the inclusion of the drug in the act was spurred by the writings of a crusading Edmonton magistrate named Emily Murphy. In 1920, she published a series of sensational articles in Maclean’s magazine on the "horrible" effects of drug use and the deliberate attempts of "evil," mainly foreign, drug traffickers to corrupt Canadian youth, the articles were collected in a book called The Black Candle, which was published in 1922.

Ms. Murphy’s extremist views were derived from mainly from interviews with U.S. law-enforcement officers. In one instance she quotes the Los Angeles chief of police on the evils of marijuana: "Persons using this narcotic smoke the dried leaves of the plant, which has the effect of driving them completely insane. The addict loses all sense of moral responsibility. Addicts to this drug, while under its influence, are immune to pain, and could be injured without having any realization of their condition. while in this condition they become raving maniacs and are liable to kill or indulge in any form of violence to other persons, using the most savage methods of cruelty without, as said before, any sense of moral responsibility..."

According to Judge McCart, who cited Ms. Murphy’s views in the Clay case, "it was in this climate of irrational fear that the criminal sanctions against marijuana were enacted."

The law has remained largely unchanged since the 1920’s even though a royal commission in 1973 concluded that the government should consider its decriminalization.

In the Netherlands, marijuana can be openly purchased in licensed establishments throughout the country. In Germany, public prosecutors now have discretionary power to dismiss minor cases of drug possession unconditionally, or they can levy fines and insist that the accused do community service for the infraction. In Spain, a 1995 amendment to the penal code says that possession of any illegal drug for personal use is no longer subject to criminal sanctions.

Proponents of decriminalization say that Canadian legislators are loath to reform cannabis policy because of pressure from the United States, where in most parts of the country the possession of cannabis is still subject to criminal sanctions.

"We can’t seem to get beyond the repressive American policy on drugs," said Mr. Young, citing what he called the strong influence of the U.S. government’s so-called war on drugs, which came to a head under the Republican administrations of Ronald Reagan and George Bush in the 1970s and 1980s. "If we were to reforms our laws, it would put tremendous pressure on U.S. lawmakers to do the same. So we maintain this cowardly insistence of being little foot soldiers to the American war on drugs."

For their part, Canadian law-enforcement officials say they are under pressure from their U.S. counterparts to get tougher on marijuana, especially its export to California, Washington and Oregon, where a great deal of marijuana grown in British Columbia ends up.

Although there are no official statistics on the amount of cannabis grown in B.C., both police and cannabis supporters say it is a mutibillion-dollar industry in the province.

The RCMP and regional police forces are pushing for stricter legislation to allow them to get tough with those who have turned the cultivation of cannabis into a lucrative and growing cottage industry, using hydroponic gardens in their homes.

Despite the efforts of local authorities, civil disobedience on the decriminalization issue appears to be growing exponentially. According to Mr. Young, "every major municipality has a hemp store, openly selling drug paraphernalia, despite the fact that there is a law in the books prohibiting the sale of drug paraphernalia." In Toronto there is a 24-hour cannabis-information line, run by a cannabis retail and advocacy group called The Friendly Stranger.

Buoyed by the decision, Ms Harichy and others have joined to set up buyers’ clubs, groups that buy marijuana and distribute it to those who have demonstrated medical need of it. Ms. Harichy, who recently opened the London Cannabis Compassion Centre, says the organization plans to sell marijuana to those who present the group with and authorized physician’s note.